Six people were shot in West Baltimore Wednesday afternoon, and one person has died, police say.
Baltimore Police officers responded to the 2100 block of West Lexington Street in the city’s Penrose/Fayette Street Outreach neighborhood around 2:25 p.m. for a report of shots fired.
One officer was about a block and a half from the scene and responded within a few minutes, Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison said at a news conference Wednesday.
The officer discovered four victims suffering from gunshot wounds. Blood and shell casings were on the ground nearby. Medical personnel took the four victims to the hospital. Then, officers discovered that two other people had been taken to local hospitals with gunshot wounds.
Police believe all six people were all on the same block of West Lexington Street when two to three others approached them on foot and open fired at Lexington’s intersection with North Smallwood Street. Then, they fled the scene, Harrison said.
The wounded victims were all male: a 44-year-old, a 39-year-old, a 33-year-old, a 26-year-old and a 16-year-old boy. Police did not provide the age for the male who died at Shock Trauma.
The teen suffered a non-life threatening gunshot wound to the forearm. The other victims are at area hospitals in critical but stable condition.
Harrison called the incident “a very brazen, very cowardly act of shooting indiscriminately into a block, where they hit six people and could have potentially hit and killed many others.”
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott asked that Baltimoreans “uplift this family that’s lost someone to (a) senseless, cowardly act of violence in the city.”
“We know this is an unfortunate thing that happens in this area of West Baltimore,” Scott said. “We will not and we cannot accept that.”
Levar Mullen, the Safe Streets supervisor at Penn North, called the shooting “frustrating” and “upsetting.”
”Life is precious,” he said. “And that’s someone’s brother, sister or mother who was just shot and lost.”
The Safe Streets leader said he and his team plan to stick around until after the crime scene is cleared to talk with community members about ways to solve conflict without guns.
”We’re out here every day trying to make a difference,” he said.
The crime scene spanned at least three blocks, and dozens of officers, investigators and detectives roamed inside the police tape around 3 p.m. The neighborhood is a residential area, mixed with boarded up homes and several auto repair shops. Grace Medical Center, the former Bon Secours Hospital, is nearby.
The 151 homicides so far this year are outpacing last year at this time by seven, according to police data, and there have been 310 non-fatal shootings, 41 more than in 2020. So far June has averaged almost one homicide a day with 13 total. West Baltimore has had 19% fewer homicides than last year, with four fewer as of June 12, and six fewer non-fatal shootings, according to the most recent police data.
Even with shootings trending down in the Western District, Wednesday’s shooting is the latest incident to leave multiple people injured in the city.
Over Memorial Day weekend, nine people were killed, including three in a single incident. At the beginning of May, a quadruple shooting in Carroll Park, left one dead and three others injured.
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